THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: ROAD TO WAR; Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

Published: October 20, 2004

In early 2003, as the clock ticked down toward the war with Iraq, C.I.A. officials met with senior military commanders at Camp Doha, Kuwait, to discuss their latest ideas for upending Saddam Hussein's government.

Intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a C.I.A. operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the ultimate information operation.

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of allied ground forces, quickly objected. To avoid being perceived as an occupying army, American forces had been instructed not to brandish the flag.

The idea was dropped, but the C.I.A.'s optimism remained.

The agency believed that many of the towns were ''ours,'' said one former staff officer who attended the session. ''At first, it was going to be U.S. flags,'' he said, ''and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere. One of the towns where they said we would be welcomed was Nasiriya, where Marines faced some of the toughest fighting in the war.''

Just as the intelligence about Iraq's presumed stockpiles of unconventional weapons proved wrong, so did much of the information provided to those prosecuting the war and planning the occupation.

In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles.

The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters.

On postwar Iraq, American intelligence agencies underestimated the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure, which became a major challenge in reconstructing the nation, and concluded erroneously that Iraq's police had had extensive professional training.

And while intelligence experts noted an insurgency in its catalog of possible dangers, it did not highlight that threat.

The National Intelligence Council, senior experts from the intelligence community, prepared an analysis in January 2003 on postwar Iraq that discussed the risk of an insurgency in the last paragraph of its 38-page assessment. ''There was never a buildup of intelligence that says: 'It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. This is the end you should prepare for,''' said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former head of the United States Central Command and now retired, referring to the insurgency. ''It did not happen. Never saw it. It was never offered.''

The Central Intelligence Agency has come under harsh criticism for its failings on Iraq's weapons and the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and critics have urged that it be overhauled as part of a broad reform of the nation's intelligence community.

The agency declined requests for interviews for this article and declined to respond to written questions submitted to its chief spokesman.

Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director who was asked by the agency to review its intelligence analysis on the Iraq war, said in an interview that much American intelligence on postwar Iraq was on the mark, particularly the assessment predicting the resentment of Iraqis if the United States did not transfer power quickly to a new Iraqi government. Still, he acknowledged some deficiencies.

''Intelligence assessments on the likely Iraqi impatience with an extended U.S. presence and the role of the army in Iraqi society were particularly prescient,'' Mr. Kerr said.

''The intelligence accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq,'' he said. ''These positive comments, however, cannot gloss over the fact that Iraq revealed some serious systemic problems in the intelligence community. Collection was poor. Too much emphasis was placed on current intelligence and there was too little research on important social, political and cultural issues.''

Trying to Catch Up

Despite more than a decade of antagonism between Saddam Hussein's government and the United States, the Bush administration was operating with limited information when it began to consider the invasion of Iraq. After the 1991 Persian Gulf war, collecting intelligence on Iraq was not always the top priority for American spy agencies, which were burdened by a multitude of potential crises and threats.

Iraq was considered a Tier2 country. North Korea, in contrast, was Tier1. As the agencies saw it, North Korea possessed an active nuclear weapons program and a large conventional army in striking range of South Korea and the American forces there. Iraq was seen more as a gathering threat.

The months before the war were a scramble for more intelligence. The American military did its best to fill the gaps, using Predator drones, U-2 spy planes and other surveillance systems. The land forces command printed 100,000 maps of the southern Iraq oilfields, which the Marines were to secure. Detailed block by block analyses were prepared for downtown Baghdad.

Iraq, in intelligence parlance, was a ''glass ball environment,'' meaning the weather was often conducive to collecting images from above.